As the Principal Technical Architect for Internal Products, you will provide architectural leadership across our portfolio of enterprise platforms and internally developed applications.
To date, architecture and technical design have largely been owned within individual product, platform and engineering teams. As our technology landscape grows in complexity, and as we undertake significant transformation across our enterprise platforms, we need to strengthen our approach to architecture across Internal Products.
You will define architectural principles, technology standards and reusable patterns that enable teams to make consistent and sustainable technology decisions. You will identify opportunities to simplify our technology landscape, improve interoperability, reduce duplication and ensure our platforms can evolve effectively as our business needs change.
You will also provide architectural leadership for major strategic initiatives, with a particular focus on the Commercial Technology Programme, helping teams translate business strategy and requirements into scalable technology architectures and ensuring programme-level decisions align with our longer-term technology direction.
This is a senior ‘Principal’ role, combining organisation-wide architectural leadership with people leadership. You will lead architecture across Internal Products, driving consistency, clarity and best practice through technical leadership, collaboration and influence. You will also directly manage two senior technical leaders, supporting their development and ensuring strong alignment of architectural and technical direction across the organisation.
Your responsibilities will include
Architecture & Technical Strategy
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Acting as the technical authority on architecture across Internal Products, providing direction across enterprise platforms, applications and strategic programmes.
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Defining and evolving architectural principles, technology standards, reference architectures and reusable patterns.
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Establishing a clear architectural direction for Internal Products that aligns with the Technology Director’s strategy and the wider FT technology strategy.
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Developing target architectures and technology roadmaps that help teams evolve their platforms towards a simpler and more sustainable technology landscape.
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Identifying opportunities to consolidate capabilities, promote reuse and reduce unnecessary technology complexity and technical debt.
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Ensuring architectural decisions appropriately consider scalability, resilience, security, operability, maintainability and cost.
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Identifying emerging architectural risks and working with teams to develop pragmatic approaches to addressing them.
Strategic Programmes & Solution Architecture
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Providing architectural leadership for major transformation initiatives, including the Commercial Technology Programme.
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Working with product, engineering and business teams to translate strategic objectives and complex business requirements into technology architectures.
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Supporting significant technology and platform decisions, ensuring solutions align with longer-term architectural direction.
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Providing architectural oversight across programmes involving multiple platforms, teams, integrations and technology partners.
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Helping teams understand architectural trade-offs and make pragmatic decisions that balance immediate delivery needs with longer-term sustainability.
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Evaluating technology platforms and strategic suppliers, providing architectural input into technology selection and investment decisions.
Integration & Platform Architecture
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Establishing and promoting consistent integration patterns across enterprise SaaS platforms, cloud-native services and internally developed applications.
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Defining principles and standards for APIs, events and system interoperability.
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Ensuring integration decisions promote appropriate reuse, loose coupling and clear ownership between systems and domains.
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Working with teams to identify opportunities to simplify integrations and reduce duplication across the technology estate.
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Collaborating with platform, security and engineering teams to ensure solutions meet wider FT technology standards.
Technical Leadership & People Development
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Managing and supporting two senior technical leaders, providing coaching, feedback and career development.
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Setting clear expectations and creating the autonomy for senior technical leaders to lead effectively within their areas.
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Ensuring strong alignment between architectural direction and technical leadership across Internal Products.
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Supporting the development of architecture and engineering leadership capability across the organisation.
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Mentoring senior engineers and others taking architectural responsibility within their teams.
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Creating an environment that encourages constructive technical challenge, collaboration, knowledge sharing and continuous learning.
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Helping build a strong architecture community and culture across Internal Products.
Architecture Governance & Collaboration
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Establishing pragmatic architecture governance that provides appropriate oversight while enabling engineering teams to retain autonomy.
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Leading architecture reviews for significant technology decisions and solutions.
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Partnering closely with Principal Engineers and Engineering Leads to ensure architectural direction can be effectively translated into engineering delivery.
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Building effective relationships with Product Managers, business stakeholders and technology leaders to ensure architecture is informed by both technology and business priorities.
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Collaborating with architects and engineering colleagues across the wider FT to promote consistency, shared standards and reuse.
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Clearly communicating architectural decisions, trade-offs, risks and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences.
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Representing Internal Products in relevant architecture and technology forums across the FT.